Wednesday, April 24, 2013

UPDATED: Check a replay of the live discussion with the NextBillion Case Writing Competition winners in the YouTube video of our Google+ Hangout below.

Earlier this month we unveiled three winners and two honorable mentions in NextBillion’s Case Writing Competition, which was sponsored by the Citi Foundation. Now you can meet the professors and students who wrote these top-tier cases chronicling how companies both large and small dealt with a variety of challenges in serving low-income customers.

At 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 24, we will be hosting a Google Hangout with several of the winning teams in the competition. The live broadcast of the Hangout will be embedded in this link, so if you bookmark this page you’ll have all you need to watch it live or to catch a replay of the broadcast soon thereafter. Incidentally, if you haven’t watched a Google Hangout in the past, check out this recent one hosted by Ashoka for its Nutrient Economy Series.

I’ll be asking several of the winning teams (not everyone can join us unfortunately) about what inspired them to write their case and what they found most compelling about the businesses and executives they featured. The educators and students also will offer their views on how business and other schools can integrate social enterprise knowledge and understanding into higher education curriculum.

Universities across the world are increasingly blending impact investing and base of the pyramid capitalism into business courses and muliti-disciplinary degree programs. The evolution of these programs has been taking place at a quick pace, as Hui Wen Chan, the Citi Foundation’s impact analytics and planning officer and a judge in the competition, noted in a recent post.

I’d love to include at least a question or two from NextBillion readers in the Hangout discussion. So either Tweet your question to @NextBillion, leave it in the comments section below either before or during the Hangout, or email it to me. I’ll do my best to include it.

To refresh yourself on the winning cases check out the announcement post, or preview or purchase the cases from GlobaLens, the publishing arm of the William Davidson Institute, which is publishing each of the cases and making them available for classroom use.